Mary Timony
★★★
Untame The Tiger
MERGE. CD/DL/LP
DC punk guitar hero (Autoclave, Helium, Ex Hex) has some thinking to do.
Mary Timony’s fifth solo outing is a break-up album. Really, though, it’s a processing a break-up album. She eschews specific sins and slings in favour of approaching their aftershocks. And while natural elements run wild in these lyrics, for every river, sun, and pile of leaves, there’s a brain, a mind, and unresolved dreams. Timony adds dashes of ’60s sounds to her guitars – a 12-string here, a slide there, even a sitar-y touch. (Fairport Convention’s Dave Mattacks drums on more than half the tracks.) But the melancholy feels more goth than hippy and, ultimately, both the sounds and lyrics feel unresolved. “I wanna know what I don’t know now,” she says at one point; “I tried so hard to know,” she sings elsewhere. By the end we’re left – unsatisfactorily and oh so accurately – feeling that some things just aren’t knowable.